Las Vegas As a Symbol: Goffman and Competing Narratives of Sin City

Las Vegas as a Symbol: Goffman and Competing Narratives of Sin City Michael Green Dmitri Shalin has demonstrated the importance of Erving Goffman to the field of sociology, and in this case to the sociology of Las Vegas as a gambling, resort, and urban center. But Goffman also was part of a trend, or more accurately what became a trend, and he played an important role in it. When Goffman came to Las Vegas in the late 1950s and early 1960s in connection with his field work as a downtown casino dealer, “the city of non-homes,” as he called it, was at a turning point in a variety of ways. When he published his findings in the late 1960s, including his essay “Where theAction Is,” Las Vegas was positioned for another turning point that he helped to coax onward: becoming an important field for scholarship. This essay attempts to explain the Las Vegas in which Goffman found himself, and the Las Vegas whose understanding he went on to enhance with the publication of his work.1 By the late 1950s, when Goffman began plotting his field work, LasVegas had given him a field to work in by managing to become part of the national consciousness.That road had been less likely than it seemed at the time or since. Since the town’s founding on May 15, 1905, as a repair stop on the Los Angeles to Salt Lake railroad, Las Vegans promoted an image of their area. At first they sought new industry, along with touting the town’s possibilities as a mining center, an agricultural community, and a health center.2 While early Las Vegans sought to promote an image of their community, the next generation and those that followed would prove more adept and successful in that quest. In the 1930s, with Hoover Dam’s construction and the state’s legalization of gambling, Las Vegans’ long-held hopes for tourism became a reality. Hundreds of thousands visited the dam annually to see the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” and Las Vegas benefited. In addition, in the 1930s and early 1940s, Las Vegas marketed itself as “Still a Frontier Town,” with casinos downtown and on the fledgling Strip taking western names and including such attractions as the “chuck wagon buffet” at the El RanchoVegas and the Last Frontier Village theme park behind the eponymous hotel.3 Las Vegas changed its marketing strategy and image just after World War II. At the behest of Chamber of Commerce president Max Kelch, Las Vegas raised money for promotion and hired a national advertising agency. By 1949, the chamber had gone in- 1 Dmitri N. Shalin, “Erving Goffman, Fateful Action, and the Las Vegas Gambling Scene,”UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal (20:1), 7; Erving Goffman, Where the Action Is (London: Allen Lane, 1969). 2 On early Las Vegas and promotions, see Ralph J. Roske, Las Vegas: A Desert Paradise (Tulsa: Continental Heritage Press, 1986); Eugene P. Moehring, “Town Making on the Nevada Frontier: Las Vegas, 1905-1925,” in Francis X. Hartigan, ed., History and Humanities: Essays in Honor of Wilbur S. Shepperson (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989), 81-104; Joan Burkhart Whitely, Young Las Vegas, 1905-1931: Before the Future Found Us (Las Vegas: Stephens Press, 2010). References to Las Vegas history come from these works, others to be footnoted, and the following: Geoff Schumacher,Sun, Sin & Suburbia: Michael Green The History of Modern Las Vegas (Revised edition, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015); Sally Denton and Roger Morris, Associate Professor The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2001 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Department of History Rex J. Rowley, Everyday Las Vegas: Local Life in a Tourist Town (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013); A.D. Hopkins and University of Nevada, K.J. Evans, eds., The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Southern Nevada (Las Vegas: Huntington Press, Las Vegas 1999). [email protected] 3 Eugene P. Moehring, Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930-2000 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 1-72. UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal t Volume 20 Issue 1 55 house and created what became known as the Las Vegas News Bureau. Photographers and videographers worked with hotel publicists to create a variety of short films, photos, and advertisements that sought to establish Las Vegas as an ideal place for adults to play. After Walt Disney opened his dream park in Anaheim in 1955, Las Vegas increasingly became known as an “Adult Disneyland” with “daytime sun and nighttime fun,” and neon signs lighting the Strip and downtown’s “Glitter Gulch,” and would continue to shape its image into the 1990s with its family theme and the early 2000s with its “What Happens in Vegas” campaign. With the postwar economic boom and such transportation improvements as bigger airplanes and the beginnings of the interstate highway system, Las Vegas was indeed positioned for a prosperous tourism industry.4 Goffman saw all of this and more, but he also saw a city on the precipice of significant change. In 1958, Nevada had been part of a national Democratic sweep that elected, among others, Governor Grant Sawyer, who took office pledging publicly to expand and enhance gaming control and privately to fight for civil rights. Responding to the state’s history of machine politics, Sawyer had run on a platform that proclaimed, “Nevada’s Not For Sale,” and he and his regulators instituted a new Gaming Commission in 1959 and, in 1960, the List of Excluded Persons, better known as the Black Book, which barred a dozen alleged mobsters from Nevada’s casinos. Within the past few years, the Bank of Las Vegas had opened and begun lending money to casinos, and the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund had started to do the same, opening new possibilities for expansion in Las Vegas.5 Sawyer’s other issue, civil rights, also was coming to the fore. As Sawyer said, in running for office, he could ill afford to risk alienating the overwhelming majority of Nevadans who had little or no interest in civil rights, but he made clear to the African American community that he would be on their side—and he was. In his first legislative session as governor, he tried to create a state Equal Rights Commission but failed, thanks to the control that rural counties exerted in the legislature: with each of the state’s 17 counties entitled to one state senator, many of Sawyer’s actions failed by large margins. But the national civil rights movement had echoes in Nevada. In 1955, the firstAfrican American dentist in Las Vegas, James McMillan, arrived and joined a cohort of educated, middle-class African Americans forced to live in segregated West Las Vegas. That year, the area welcomed its first true resort hotel, the Moulin Rouge, which closed after six months because of a variety of financial problems, but prompted the arrival of Bob Bailey, a veteran entertainer who joined the civil rights movement, as did other performers who came to work at the hotel. For the rest of the 1950s, they organized political action groups, economic boycotts, and a variety of other activities. 4 “The Mob on the Run,” KLAS-TV-8, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1987; Larry Gragg, Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013); John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 5 Grant Sawyer, Gary E. Elliott, and R.T. King, Hang Tough! Grant Sawyer: An Activist in the Governor’s Mansion (Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1993). 56 UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal t Volume 20 Issue 1 Michael Green When Goffman went to work in downtown Las Vegas, he was in a white community. The 2012 television series Vegas, starring Dennis Quaid as Ralph Lamb, a longtime Clark County sheriff, included a scene set in the Golden Nugget, which had opened in 1946. It showed signs by the bathrooms saying, “Whites Only.” This perfectly depicted the racism and segregation of the area, although no such signs appeared; African Americans were not allowed in casinos except as porters and maids, and occasionally as entertainers—but only occasionally. Finally, in March 1960, after the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins, McMillan, as president of the NAACP, demanded that Strip and downtown casinos desegregate, and the Moulin Rouge Agreement of that month led to all but two of the area’s gambling properties finally permitting African Americans to gamble, eat, drink, and stay in their rooms. McMillan said he told his contact with the casino owners, “I don’t have any money. I’m not trying to cut into their business. All I’m trying to do is make this a cosmopolitan city, and that will make more money for them.”6 Thus, when Goffman worked in Las Vegas as part of his research, he unwittingly opted to do so at an unusual and a pivotal time in the area’s history. How much it affected his research, or how conscious he was of it, is debatable. One irony is that at the time he shifted in his research from dealing cards to counting them, state gaming regulators concentrated on using the Black Book to try to keep out mobsters, but later shifted their focus to card counters and various cheaters. As a dealer and as a card counter, Goffman worked in a world that was corrupt in a variety of ways—or at least in different ways from academe.

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